This Guy Built a 33-Foot-Wide Computer to Play Tetris On

A man decided he wanted to build a computer. There's nothing weird about that, as we've all sketched out dream lists of RAM and processor combinations and thought about investing in a really quiet fan. But this man did it on a silly scale, recreating the room-sized leviathans of old by creating something out of 40,000 individual transistors like it's the 1940s.

The end result is the Megaprocessor, a computer so big it requires a phone to be set to panorama mode to take a photo of it. To make it more exciting for the kids of today, creator James Newman stuck LEDs (10,000 of them) on a lot of the lines, letting users see the data travelling between the various logic and maths elements and the system's memory.

And to show that it actually works, he put Tetris on it, getting it up and working on the machine's 256 bytes of memory:

How can such a clever man be so rubbish at Tetris? Megaprocessor can run at a speed of 8Khz, but has been deliberately down-clocked to just 1hz so it's possible to see the data trundling about the place, live. [Megaprocessor via Engadget]